Golden Bull award winners 2021

Peter Frater wonders what ‘wallet opportunity’ means, as well as the rest of the following ‘Boohoo’ gibberish.

The transaction represents a fantastic opportunity to grow the group’s target addressable market and increase the share of wallet opportunity through a new capital light and low risk operating model that is complementary to the group’s highly-successful direct-to-consumer multi-brand platform.

An anonymous supporter sent us the following, by Anna Simpson, writing for ‘Futures Centre’ – enjoy!

What’s the role of narratives and how do we update them once they’ve become obsolete? Anna Simpson discusses the process of shifting narratives in follow up to 2020, the agents and power dynamics implicated, and the role of futures as a tool to help us navigate away from polarisation and zero-sum solutions and co-create a new, truly democratic narrative.

This picking and choosing is the work narratives do in society. They take our values and worldviews and translate them into ways of being and doing, through the stories they tell. As Future Narratives Lab puts it, “Narratives are the deep patterns in our culture and discourse that determine what is prioritised and seen as relevant, and what is put aside and dismissed.” Narrative Initiative uses a simple model of waves to say something similar.  

“Are you making progress?” my mother would ask me as a child, meaning, ‘Have you done your homework?’ Dig under the question and you’ll find a liberal narrative of personal endeavour for the betterment of society. But does ‘progress’ mean the same thing today? 

Not to many: the idea that human agency and technology can provide answers to complex problems, improving lives in a linear fashion, rings alarm bells. If we focus too narrowly on providing solutions to singular challenges, we develop blindspots to more complex outcomes. Antibiotics, for instance, are both yesterday’s solution and tomorrow’s nemesis. Culture Hack Labs identifies ‘progress’ as the narrative source of much inequality: it offers a “license for the limitless expansion of Man towards his own perfection”, at the expense of all that is ‘other’.

Patrick O found the following, by Scott Haslem of the Australian Financial Review, confusing enough to enter it into this year’s Golden Bulls. At first glance, it doesn’t seem too bad, and is very short, but is completely meaningless.

A good place to start is a blend of passive physically backed, institutional-quality exposure to sector leaders and a diversified fund to track evolving trends.

Larry Darby was moved to alert us to the following example of classic gobbledygook, from the Pensions Dashboard Programme.

With our procurement of the principal digital architecture underway, and further work taking place on developing an onboarding strategy, we are in the position to add further detail to this timeline, to enable industry to prepare for connecting with the dashboards ecosystem. We have also undertaken invaluable market engagement on the identity service, to support the final development of requirements prior to going to tender.

Mike Etkind was understandably unimpressed by the following, from the NHS England Primary Care Bulletin.

The ICS Design Framework set an expectation that provider collaboratives will be a key component in enabling ICSs to deliver their core purpose. This guidance outlines minimum expectations for how providers should work together in provider collaboratives, offering principles to support local decision-making and suggesting the function and form that systems and providers may wish to consider.

Michael Vaughan (not that one) unsurprisingly did not appreciate the following email from SP Energy Networks.

As your local Distribution Network Operator (DNO) – the company responsible for the connection of your power generation assets to the local electricity network – we have previously notified you of an important change to the Distribution Code.

To further update you all, EREC G59 requirements must be implemented by generation owners by 1 September 2022. Where Loss of Mains (LoM) is provided by Vector Shift, it must be removed and/or replaced with Rate of Change of Frequency protection (RoCoF).

The RoCoF setting requirement has been changed to 1 Hz/s with a definite time delay of 500 milliseconds. To learn more about the programme, please visit: https://futureproofyourpower.co.uk/.

If your site is already compliant with the LoM requirements of the programme, it is your responsibility to inform SP Energy Networks by submitting a compliance declaration via the ENA Portal (https://www.ena-eng.org/ALoMCP/) and uploading any relevant supporting documentation.

Please find attachments containing further information.